Catholics fear Vatican’s “Vatileaks” scandal will harm their Church

Tags:

Catholic clerics and pilgrims visiting St Peter’s basilica on Tuesday expressed shock over a scandal that has shaken the Vatican and led to the arrest of the pope’s butler, fearing it would hurt both the pontiff and the Church.

“It’s awful and very sad that something like that can happen right at the heart of the Vatican,” said David Kaberia, a priest from Meru in Kenya, standing under the sun in a queue snaking through half of St Peter’s Square to tour one of the holiest sites of Roman Catholicism.

“This is an inside job by greedy people and I think it will inevitably affect the Church worldwide because this is the centre of the Church’s power,” he told Reuters.

The scandal exploded last week when, within a few days, the head of the Vatican’s own bank was sacked, the pope’s butler was arrested over leaks of sensitive documents and a book was published alleging conspiracies among cardinals and corruption in the Church’s financial dealings with Italian business.

“This is a warning for all of us in the Chuch community, that we should only look after spiritual things and not be corrupted by matters of money, career and power,” said Father Francesco, a priest frorm Florence.

Italian press reports quoting leakers said the butler, who had access to the pope’s private apartment, was merely a scapegoat in a behind-the-scenes struggle for power in the Holy See and that the plot went much higher and wider than him.

“SOME” Catholics fear this. Others of us hope and pray that these leaks will FINALLY lead to a real clean-up of a very bad situation that has existed for a long time — even if we didn’t know about it.

It is no fun being an unwitting and unwilling party to an international criminal enterprise, thinking all the while that it was something quite different. We need to do all we can to rid the Church of sexual abuse, cover-ups, money laundering, lying, intimidation, solicitation and acceptance of bribes, and all the rest. Of course, being a human institution, the Church will never be perfect; but it can certainly be much better than is now the case.